20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Before I wrap up Nine Princes in Amber (as well as Devil in a Forest by Gene Wolfe), I want to take a second to say a few words about Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

For the love of God, do not read this book. Do not, especially, read the unabriged version.

You know all the cool parts you see in the movie versions? Attacking ships? Finding Atlantis? The giant squid? Those make up—I shit you not—about 5% of the book.

The rest is page after page of the characters sitting in front of a window, identifying and classifying the fish that go by. For paragraphs and pages they do nothing but do this. I am not making this up: our ancestors were easily impressed.

I know it's banned book week, and probably impolitic to discourage you from reading. It's probably worse to talk shit about one of the pillars of science fiction. But seriously, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea sucks hard.

Nine Princes in Amber

Part of what I've been trying to do is go back and catch up on all the geek books—the canon, the one's that you're supposed to have read. You typically find these list in the back of "year's best" anthologies.

I've been both amazed and disappointed. I never thought I'd enjoy Arthur C. Clarke so much: his reputation as a "hard" SF writer kept me away from his works (Ringworld by Niven burned me badly on hard SF). But while Clarke (usually) keeps the laws of physics firmly in grasp, his writing is fundamentally about the human side of things, and he never loses fact that technology can be both a help and a hindrance.

I finally managed to get hold of a copy of Nine Princes in Amber, the first of the series by Roger Zelazny. This is a book I've been trying to find for years (keep in mind that when I say that, I mean I've been looking for a paperback copy in used bookstores for years) with no success. Finally, though, I was able to begin this series that constantly shows up on those canonical lists.


I'm about 30 pages away from finishing, and my opinion is: yeah, okay.

The premise of the book is that our world is just a reflection, a shadow (excuse me, Shadow) of Amber, the real world of magic and heroes. The princes of the land of Amber are constantly sparring for the throne, and the protagonist, Corwin, wakes up with amnesia and slowly figures this out. The story starts out in a terse, noir style that fits well with the POV (sort of reminds me of the Bogart film, Dark Victor), and then we get to Amber and it turns into a fantasy novel about princes, thrones, and war filled with expendible aliens.

It's hard to care about who's sitting on the Throne of Amber, because Zelanzy establishes pretty clearly that all of the Princes (and Princesses, for that matter) are all spoiled brats who are allowed to appoint themselves lords of creation because of their power to manipulate the Shadows (alternate realities). Corwin isn't as bad, of course, but that's pretty much by virtue of his amnesia as his real character.

Spoiler alert, here.

When Corwin and one of his brothers, Bleys, decide to stage an assault on Amber to prevent their brother Eric from crowning himself King, they form an army by searching the Shadows. They are looking for, and find, races in a world where people who look like them are gods and have a myth about an evil brother who must be deposed. They put together a fighting force of a quarter million beings who Corwin reflects will probably all get killed fighting for them.

He lets this bother him for about two sentences, and then it's off to claim the throne!

In fairness, the book is a swashbuckling adventure, with naval battles and narrow escapes, but fails in it's central goal: to make me care about what the hero wants. So what if Eric is King of Amber? I can't imagine that he'd be worse than anyone else. Corwin tells us that Eric's victory would be reflected in the Shadows, but fails to point out anything negative about it, other than Eric isn't Corwin.

Thirty more pages to go. We'll see if Zelazny can pull a rabbit out yet.